The European Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) has been at the heart of Solidaridad’s advocacy work for years now. In that time we, along with many other CSOs and producer organisations have argued that the EUDR, to be effective, needs to be inclusive for smallholders. Corporations, in efforts to reduce risks often choose to exclude smallholder farmers from their supply chains. The produce of smallholder farms can be harder to verify and trace, representing a potential risk for corporations. Yet excluding smallholders won’t stop deforestation, it will just remove it from EU value chains while failing to support smallholders to become more sustainable.
Yet the EUDR’s text is clear – operators must adopt measures to mitigate the risk of non-compliance with the EUDR, including through capacity building and investments to support smallholders. This opens the door to the only real way forward: risk mitigation that doesn’t exclude smallholder farmers, but instead supports them on their journey to compliance.
In the midst of all discussion on EUDR, there has been little discussion and guidance on how to implement risk mitigation strategies. Ahead of the Regulation’s application at the end of the year, Solidaridad has joined 16 civil society and smallholder organisations to publish a new briefing paper aimed at filling this gap and starting the discussion. It lists five principles for smallholder-inclusive risk mitigation under the EUDR, and opens the way for a serious conversation about a mutually beneficial implementation of the EUDR. They are:
- Complement individual supply chain approaches with landscape or similar multistakeholder strategies
- Be preventive and long-term by making forward-looking investments and developing stable commercial relationships with farmers
- Treat exclusion as a last resort and consider joint investigation of alerts and appeals before any contract termination
- Pay for compliance costs while seeking informed consent on data usage and enabling data ownership and access
- Be gender-responsive by addressing the specific barriers women smallholders face
We hope that this briefing will help elevate the concept of risk mitigation, making it a fundamental tool to tackle the root causes of deforestation, and support farmers in adopting long term deforestation-free production practices.
You can read the full paper at the link below.